Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

Progress

It’s all over our televisions, newspapers and the internet. Every day we’re bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is — Brexit, financial collapse, unemployment, poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. Indeed, our world now seems to be on the brink of collapse, and yet:

• We’ve made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000

• 285,000 more people have gained access to safe water every day for the last 25 years

• In the last 50 years world poverty has fallen more than it did in the preceding 500

Contrary to what most of us believe, our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented. By almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive.

More Praise for Progress

‘His unfailing optimism and well-argued points generate powerful good-news vibes.’

Esquire

‘An exhilarating book. With the combination of arresting stories and striking data, Progress will change your understanding about where we’ve come from and where we may be heading.’

Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

‘Johan Norberg chronicles the still largely unknown fact that humanity is now healthier, happier, cleaner, cleverer, freer and more peaceful than ever before. He also explains why in this superb book.’

Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything

‘At a time of profound pessimism, Johan Norberg is refreshingly, but not glibly, optimistic. His excellent book documents the dramatic improvements in people’s lives and reminds us of the huge potential for further progress – provided we are open to it.’

Philippe Legrain, author of European Spring

‘In this brightly written, upbeat book, the Swedish author blends facts, anecdotes, and official statistics to describe humanity’s triumph in achieving the present unparalleled level of global living standards . . . While acknowledging the mayhem, hunger, and poverty still facing much of the world, the author remains optimistic that human ingenuity will prevail in shaping the future. A refreshingly rosy assessment of how far many of us have come from the days when life was uniformly nasty, brutish, and short.’

Kirkus

‘Excellent…Norberg’s book comprehensively documents the myriad ways the state of humanity has vastly improved over the past couple of centuries.’

Reason

To Alicia, Alexander and Nils-Erik – it’s your world now.

[T]he Progress of human Knowledge will be rapid, and Discoveries made of which we have at present no Conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the Happiness of knowing what will be known 100 Years hence.

Benjamin Franklin, 1783

Contents

Introduction

1 Food

2 Sanitation

3 Life expectancy

4 Poverty

5 Violence

6 The environment

7 Literacy

8 Freedom

9 Equality

10 The next generation

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

The good old days are now

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Franklin Pierce Adams¹

Terrorism. ISIS. War in Syria and Ukraine. Crime, murder, mass shootings. Famines, floods, pandemics. Global warming. Stagnation, inequality, refugees.

‘Doom and gloom, everywhere’, as a woman on the street responded when public radio asked her to describe the state of the world.² It seems to be the story of our time.

These perceptions feed the fear and nostalgia on which populists of the Right and the Left campaign. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan made the case that America had to become great again, like it was in the good old days. Fifty-eight per cent of those who voted for Britain to leave the EU in the country’s recent referendum say life is worse today than thirty years ago.

In 1955, thirteen per cent of the Swedish public thought that there were ‘intolerable conditions’ in society. After half a century of expanded human liberties, rising incomes, reduction in poverty and improved health care, more than half of all Swedes thought so.³

Many experts and authorities agree. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently testified before US Congress: ‘I will personally attest to the fact that . . . [the world] is more dangerous than it has ever been.’⁴ Pope Francis claims that globalization has condemned many people to starve: ‘It is true that in absolute terms the world’s wealth has grown, but inequality and poverty have arisen.’⁵

On the political left, activist Naomi Klein argues our civilization is ‘on a collision course’, and that we are ‘destabilising our planet’s life support system’.⁶ On the right, philosopher John Gray thinks that human beings are ‘homo rapiens’, a predatory and destructive species that is approaching the end of civilization.⁷

I used to share their pessimism. When I began to shape my worldview in Sweden in the 1980s, I found modern civilization hard to stomach. Factories, highways and supermarkets to me were a dismal sight, and modern working life seemed sheer drudgery. I associated this new global consumer culture with the problems of poverty and conflict that television brought into our living room. Instead, I dreamed of a society that put the clock back, a society that lived in harmony with nature. I hadn’t thought about the way people had actually lived before the Industrial Revolution, without medicines and antibiotics, safe water, sufficient food, electricity or sanitary systems. Instead I had thought of it more in terms of a modern excursion into the countryside.

Source: Maddison 2003.⁸

But I started reading history and travelling the world. I found I could no longer romanticize the good old days once I began to understand what they had really been like. One of the countries on which I focused my studies experienced chronic undernourishment – it was poorer, with shorter life expectancy and higher child mortality than the average sub-Saharan African country. That country was my ancestors’ Sweden, 150 years ago. The truth is that the good old days were awful.

Despite what we hear on the news and from many authorities, the great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy at birth has increased more than twice as much in the last century as it did in the previous 200,000 years. The risk that any individual will be exposed to war, die in a natural disaster, or be subjected to dictatorship has become smaller than in any other epoch. A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday.

War, crime, disasters and poverty are painfully real, and during the last decade global media has made us aware of them in a new way – live on screen, every day, around the clock – but despite this ubiquity, these are problems that have always existed, partially hidden from view. The difference now is that they are rapidly declining. What we see now are the exceptions, where once they would have been the rule.

This progress started with the intellectual Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when we began to examine the world with the tools of empiricism, rather than being content with authorities, traditions and superstition. Its political corollary, classical liberalism, began to liberate people from the shackles of heredity, authoritarianism and serfdom. Following hot on its heels was the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, when the industrial power at our disposal multiplied, and we began to conquer poverty and hunger. These successive revolutions were enough to liberate a large part of humanity from the harsh living conditions it had always lived under. With late twentieth-century globalization, as these technologies and freedoms began to spread to the rest of the world, this was repeated on a larger scale and at a faster pace than ever before.

Humans are not always rational or benevolent, but in general they want to improve their lives and the lives of their families, and with a tolerable degree of freedom they will work hard to make this happen. Step by step, this adds to humanity’s store of knowledge and wealth. In this era, more people are allowed to experiment with different perspectives and solutions to problems than before. So we constantly accumulate more knowledge and every individual can contribute and achieve on the shoulders of hundreds of millions who have come before in a virtuous cycle.

This book is about humanity’s triumphs. But it is not a message of complacency. It is written partly as a warning. It would be a terrible mistake to take this progress for granted. There are forces at work in the world that would destroy the pillars of this development – the individual freedoms, open economy and technological progress. Terrorists and dictators do what they can to undermine open societies, but there are also threats from within our societies. Nationalist and authoritarian politicians want to dismantle individual freedoms and start building walls between countries again.

These forces want us to think that the world is dangerous and that things are spiralling out of control, because frightened people think differently. Social psychologists who study authoritarian attitudes make the case that they are not based on a stable personality trait, but on a predisposition that can be activated under certain circumstances. When people think that their society or their group is under threat they begin to express more authoritarian and protectionist views even on issues that are not related to the particular threat. It’s a flight from freedom, and into something supposedly familiar, safe and secure.

Frightened people do not ask for opportunities, but for protection. They don’t vote for openness and freedom, but for the strongman who promises them security and provides easily identifiable scapegoats. If we think we don’t have anything to lose in doing so, it’s because we have a bad memory.

It is precisely for this reason that we have to remember that when people are allowed freedom, they don’t create chaos, but progress. At this point in time we have to study the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world. It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.

This book is about this progress, about what happened, how it happened and why we missed it.

It is surely humanity’s greatest achievement. If we could divert our eyes from our cellphones’ news flashes more often, and look around us, at the science, technology and wealth that are now an integrated part of our lives, we would see proof of our abilities every day. So I borrow my dedication from the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who built and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (‘If you are looking for a monument, look around you’).

1

Food

[W]hoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

Jonathan Swift¹

One winter’s day in 1868 my great-great-great-great grandfather, Eric Norberg, returned to Nätra in northern Ångermanland, Sweden, with several bags of wheat flour in his cart. He came from a family of ‘south carters’, northern farmers who flouted Sweden’s trade barriers and monopolies by going on long trading journeys. Eric Norberg sold country-woven linens in the south of Sweden and returned with salt and cereals.

Seldom, though, was his return so longed for as on this occasion. It was a famine year. Crops had failed everywhere in the country and those who were short of flour had to mix bark into their bread. A man from the neighbouring parish of Björna recalls his personal experience, aged seven, of those hungry years:

We often saw mother weeping to herself, and it was hard on a mother, not having any food to put on the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were often seen going from farm to farm, begging for a few crumbs of bread. One day three children came to us, crying and begging for something to still the pangs of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother was forced to tell them that we had nothing but a few crumbs of bread which we ourselves needed. When we children saw the anguish in the unknown children’s supplicatory eyes, we burst into tears and begged mother to share with them what crumbs we had. Hesitantly she acceded to our request, and the unknown children wolfed down the food before going on to the next farm, which was a good way off from our home. The following day all three were found dead between our farm and the next.²

Young and old, haggard and pale, went from farm to farm, begging for something to delay their death from starvation. The most emaciated livestock were tied upright because they could not stand on their own feet. Their milk was often mingled with blood. Several thousand Swedes died of starvation within that year and the next.

Failed harvests were not uncommon in Sweden. A single famine, between 1695 and 1697, claimed the lives of one in fifteen, and there are references to cannibalism in oral accounts. Without machinery, cold storage, irrigation or artificial fertilizers, crop failures were always a threat, and in the absence of modern communications and transportation, failed harvests often spelled famine.

Getting enough energy for the body and the brain to function well is the most basic human need, but historically, it has not been satisfied for most people. Famine was a universal, regular phenomenon, recurring so insistently in Europe that it ‘became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life’, according to the French historian Fernand Braudel. France, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, suffered twenty-six national famines in the eleventh century, two in the twelfth, four in the fourteenth, seven in the fifteenth, thirteen in the sixteenth, eleven in the seventeenth and sixteen in the eighteenth. In each century, there were also hundreds of local famines.⁴

Sources: FAO 1947, 2003, 2015.³

In times of famine, peasants from the countryside turned to the towns, where they crowded together and begged for food and often died in squares and streets, as in Venice and Amiens in the sixteenth century. The cold weather in the seventeenth century made the situation much worse. In 1694, a chronicler in Meulan, Normandy, noted that the hungry harvested the wheat before it was ripe, and ‘large numbers of people lived on grass like animals’.⁵ They might have been relatively lucky – in central France in 1662, ‘Some people ate human flesh.’⁶ In Finland, the years 1695–7 are known as ‘the years of many deaths’ when between a quarter and a third of the entire population died of famine.

Braudel points out that this was in privileged Europe; ‘Things were far worse in Asia, China and India.’ They were dependent on rice harvests crossing vast distances and every crisis became a disaster. Braudel quotes a Dutch merchant who witnessed the Indian famine of 1630–1:

‘Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.’ The familiar human dramas followed: wives and children abandoned, children sold by parents, who either abandoned them or sold themselves in order to survive, collective suicides . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and ‘drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies’. ‘Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it . . . in the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.’⁷

Even in normal times margins in the most developed countries were exceedingly narrow, and the food not always very nutritious, nor could it be kept very long. Often it had to be procured just before eating. People dried and salted down their food for storage, but salt was expensive. In an ordinary home in my ancestors’ province of Ångermanland a hundred years ago, there were four meals: potatoes, herring and bread for breakfast; porridge or gruel for lunch; potatoes, herring and bread for dinner; and porridge or gruel for supper. This is what people ate every day, except on Sundays, when they had meat soup (if there was any meat) mixed with barley grains. There being no china, everyone ate from the same dish, using a wooden spoon which was afterwards licked clean and put away in the table drawer.⁸

The importance of adequate nutrition for people’s health and survival has been documented in a disturbing way by a study of life expectancy at the age of fifty in what are now rich countries, at the turn of the last century. It turns out that it is almost half a year longer for those born in the Northern Hemisphere between October and December than for those born between April and June. In the Southern Hemisphere, it is the other way around. Those born in the Northern Hemisphere, who later migrated to the South, also live longer if they were born between October and December. One of the probable reasons for this is that fresh fruit and vegetables were more readily available in the autumn until quite recently, even in rich countries. It seems that nutrition in the womb and early infancy was better for these children, since birth weights were also higher in the autumn.⁹

At the end of the eighteenth century, ordinary French families had to spend about half their income on grains alone – often this meant gruel. The French and English in the eighteenth century received fewer calories than the current average in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most tormented by undernourishment.¹⁰

If you sometimes hear about short working hours in the ancient past, don’t be too envious. People worked as long as they could. The main limiting factor was that they did not have access to the calories they needed for children to grow properly or for adults to maintain healthy bodily functions. Our ancestors were stunted, skinny and short, which required fewer calories and made it possible to work with less food. The economist and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, who is one of the world’s leading experts on health and development, talks about a ‘nutritional trap’ in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: because of this lack of calories people could not work hard enough to produce enough food to be able to work hard.¹¹

It has been estimated that 200 years ago some twenty per cent of the inhabitants of England and France could not work at all. At most they had enough energy for a few hours of slow walking per day, which condemned most of them to a life of begging.¹² The lack of adequate nutrition had a serious effect on the population’s intellectual development as well, since children’s brains need fat to develop properly.

Some thinkers at the time assumed this would always be the case. In the eighteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus concluded that human numbers would always outrun the amount of food available. He saw